If you are a stickler for protocol and worried, for example, about how to address the younger daughter of a marquess, there is no need to refer to some stuffy old book on etiquette: all the guidance you need is freely available on the modern, swinging website of the Ministry of Justice. I was told this by a friend this week and didn't at first believe him. But then I went to the website and, in a section headed Forms of Address, found that all marquesses have the preposition "of" before their title (with the exceptions of Marquess Townshend and Marquess Camden); that all marquesses, with or without the preposition, should be addressed in letters as "Dear Lord" followed by their title; that they should formally be styled "the Most Honourable"; and that their younger children should be called "Lord" or "Lady" together with their first names and surnames. I single out marquesses because I have never been very clear about their standing in the great scheme of things, but the website provides the same sort of information about the four other ranks in the peerage – dukes, earls, viscounts and barons – as well as about knights and baronets, judges and mayors, members of parliament and Church of England clergy.

The first thing I asked myself was why it should be considered the business of a Ministry of Justice to explain how hereditary noblemen should be addressed. A call to the ministry's press office yielded the information that its Forms of Address section used to be on the website of the Department for Constitutional Affairs until that short-lived New Labour institution, which replaced the old Lord Chancellor's Department, was renamed the Ministry of Justice and had probation, prisons, and prevention of reoffending added to its responsibilities. But that is not an adequate answer. With their imminent elimination from the House of Lords, hereditary peers will cease to have any constitutional role at all; and it seems odd of any government, but especially of a so-called Labour one, to worry about how they are addressed when hardly anybody else does any longer.

Even the most respectable newspapers are constantly getting aristocratic titles wrong; and while, as a traditionalist, I find this annoying, I doubt if it annoys many people other than, possibly, the holders of the titles themselves. It is bizarre of a government that rejects the hereditary principle and is so indifferent to tradition that it has tried (though unsuccessfully) to abolish the ancient office of Lord Chancellor, to seek at the same time to promote deference to the aristocracy in British society.

Deference, in any case, is very much a thing of the past. Calling people you've never met by their first names is almost the norm. Practically nobody writes letters any more, and emails tend to begin with the word "hi". So why should anyone care whether it is right or wrong to call a baron a baron (it's wrong) or a baroness a baroness (it's right)? Yet the government appears to think that we should care, which illustrates what a mess it has so far made of its efforts at constitutional reform.

My application for a shotgun certificate had to be countersigned by "a member of parliament . . . or someone of similar standing", according to the instructions. This sounds a little out of date, given that MPs now probably rank lower in public esteem than the two categories that always used to come bottom of the list in opinion polls – journalists and estate agents. In fact, I have got my application countersigned by the most respectable among my country neighbours, Timothy Jackson-Stops, who, as a former chairman of the company bearing his name, used to be an estate agent, albeit of an exalted kind.

If I were an Italian, the person "of standing" I would ask to sign such an application might in future be a former prostitute, since it is alleged that Silvio Berlusconi holds members of the world's oldest profession in such high regard that he encourages them to enter politics. Patrizia D'Addario, the escort girl who claims to have slept with him at his official residence in Rome, said that as a reward he offered her the chance to stand for election to the European Parliament. Actually, if a parliament is supposed to represent all sections of society, I see no reason why prostitutes shouldn't be members. They aren't criminals, and most of them probably aren't any dodgier than some existing MPs.

Only time will tell whether swine flu turns into something like the black death, but at the moment this looks most unlikely. Nevertheless, the panic continues to grow, generated in the main by those whose job should be to try to keep us calm. By them I mean the government and local councils.

The authorities are so terrified of being found wanting that they fall over themselves to show how ready they are to deal with whatever catastrophe may come their way. Swine flu readiness has become a competitive sport. Exeter city council's announcement that it may reopen Victorian underground burial chambers to accommodate the swine flu dead is hardly reassuring to those hoping that the pandemic will prove relatively benign. Nor is the government's proposal that children in nursery schools should be deprived of their teddy bears as a precaution against the spread of the disease. These are moves designed to make the authorities feel smug at the expense of everyone else's peace of mind.

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